John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Leave it up to David Chou to provide the perfect visual for the path that many healthcare CIOs find themselves on and what they need to do to get on the right path.

The problem that’s described in this graphic is real. I’ve met many healthcare CIOs that just want to “keep the lights on.” Their goal is to just provide the tech and let other people figure out the business. The problem with this thinking is that you’re just making yourself a commodity that’s easily replaceable since you’re not adding to the bottom line of the business.

What’s not illustrated in this graphic is how hard it is to get off the treadmill of putting out fires and starting to think strategically about where you need to take your organization. Those fires feel so pressing that it’s easy to fill all your time with things that don’t strategically help your organization in the long run.

The good news is that the solution is simple. Start allocating more time thinking strategically about what your IT organization is doing to improve your organization by increasing revenue, lowering costs, improving efficiency, and higher quality care. Yes, you still have to balance this with still maintaining the infrastructure. However, I see more and more CIOs delegating the infrastructure challenges so they can spend the time needed to make sure that IT is a strategic part of their organization and not just a commodity service.